Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn.
"I am disappointed in you" said my primary school's principal as she gave me a disheartened look. I had just gotten back my result for the PSLE, the Primary School Leaving Exam. I stared in disbelief at the number 231. This was the score I had gotten and it was much lower than expected. My heart sunk as I recalled all the time I had wasted as I was too complacent.
I would always get As and Bs with little to no effort. It was always this way since I started school and because of this, I became conceited. I was proud of my intelligence and believed that I would always get good grades without studying much. This delusion was made worse during the preliminary test as I attained the best result in the school even though I had not studied very hard. I was ecstatic! And was showered with praises from friends and teachers. At the same time, my form teacher who knew me well, warned "Don't be too smug and continue to work hard. This is not the real test, the actual test would be the upcoming PSLE."
I did not heed her advice, being too conceited, I thought " If this was the result I could get without much effort, I wouldn't have to worry about the PSLE." I spent the next few weeks playing computer games and watching movies while all my friends were doing revisions after revisions. On the day before the exam, I nonchalantly revise for the test, still feeling confident from the result of the preliminary test. I took the exam and went home without thinking much about it.
A few weeks went by before we were called back to the school to collect the result. Everyone was seated in the hall gawking at the projection screen as they eagerly await their result. The top ten students would be called up onto the stage to receive their result and I was sure that I was one of them. The teacher called out the names one by one, I grew a little less confident and felt a little more regret every time another person's name was called instead of mine. After all ten names were announced and my name was not called, I was discouraged as I realised that I was not one of the top scorer. But the worse part of all was when the school's principal walked to me and said "I am disappointed in you". I was lost for words. I looked around only to see my teachers giving me fictitious smile. I know that deep down that they were all disappointed in me. I suddenly felt crestfallen as I realised that I had failed my teachers and families.
I decided not to let this setback gets me down. I got into a good secondary school and worked on changing my attitude. I have learned not to be complacent and worked through secondary school to become the one of the top scorers in the graduating class.
To this day, I still remember the shame and disappointment that I have felt. I would recall the moment the principal said " I am disappointed in you" every time I achieve a good result and remind myself not to be too complacent. I wake up every morning reminding myself that ' success is the result of attitude not aptitude.'
Overall, the idea is very good. I think that you really need to go into more detail about what you learned, avoiding generalities. For example, how did you work on changing your attitude? Your closing paragraphs are a little scattered, and they really should carry the weight of why this failure was important to you.
I would also like to comment on your use of language. Overall, it's relatively clear, but there is a little bit of wordiness in some places and there are a few times that you reuse words, such as "conceited." College essays are really supposed to reflect your personality, so you want to write almost as if you were talking to your reader. If you use words like "crestfallen" in conversation, then maybe, however, it seems to stick out of your essay a little bit.
